Schaefer 'demanded excellence' from Baltimore business community

Many credit former Mayor and Gov. William Donald Schaefer with helping to reinvent the Inner Harbor. But ask baker John Paterakis, and he’ll say upscale Harbor East wouldn’t be what it was without Schaefer, either.

Nearing the end of Schaefer’s tenure as mayor, the city moved to buy what would become Harbor East from Paterakis’ H&S Bakery for $13 million but political pressure killed the deal.

“Halfway through he called me and said, ‘I’m not going to buy that property, but I trust you will do the right thing,’” Paterakis said in an interview. “I said, ‘Well you’ve got to be nuts. I’m not a developer; I’m a baker.”

In the end, Schaefer got his way, and Paterakis developed the new commercial hub that will soon be home to the city’s first Four Seasons hotel. Paterakis and others in the city’s business community say that’s the way it was with Schaefer — he had lofty goals for the city and stood behind them, urging the city’s businesses to do the same. Schaefer died Monday after a career in City Hall and Annapolis that spanned half a century.

“He demanded excellence from the people that worked for him — he demanded excellence from the business community,” said real estate broker Robert A. Manekin, whose father, also Robert Manekin, served as chairman of the Greater Baltimore Committee while Schaefer was mayor. “He would drive my father crazy. I can remember a half a dozen times when my father would make some comment about the mayor’s calling, and he wants this done or he wants GBC to get that done.”

Schaefer’s most recognized contributions to the city can be seen from the spot where a bronze statue of him was installed in 2008 — Harborplace, the World Trade Center, the Maryland Science Center and the National Aquarium.

David Pittenger, who has served as the aquarium’s executive director for 15 years and also worked there while Schaefer was mayor, said it was a gamble to push for such projects. Today, the aquarium spends heavily on sophisticated market research and analysis when planning its programs and exhibits, but when the venue launched in 1981, it was one of the first of its kind, he said.

“Today this would be a colossal undertaking,” Pittenger said.

Schaefer doesn’t hold all of the responsibility for those developments — he governed during a time where federal money was flowing heavily into urban centers across the country, said Donald C. Fry, CEO of the GBC. But he was a force that pushed them along.

“His fingerprints are on every major project in the renaissance of Baltimore,” Fry said. “He was always someone who was looking for what that next project was.”

Paterakis, who said he considered Schaefer a friend, credited the former mayor most for his foresight in the city’s revival, although he wasn’t always easy to work with.

“He knew exactly what he wanted, and the worst thing you could ever do was go against his wish,” Paterakis said. “You could feel it. But he was right most of the time.”